Dr Bashir Qureshi, the author of the book Transcultural Medicine, was born in India, educated in Pakistan, and received his medical training in the United Kingdom. He writes, lectures, and broadcasts on the theme of transcultural medicine, which he defines as "the knowledge of medical and communication encounters between a doctor or health worker of one ethnic group and a patient of another" (p vii).
The book is a compilation of two original articles and 35 others that have been published in the British medical press, 1981 through 1988. The articles are arbitrarily clustered in three parts: general aspects, special considerations, and selected points. Part I deals mainly with intercultural aspects of patient and doctor relationships in communication, etiquette in the examination, sensitivity of ethnic terminology, diagnostic difficulty, psychiatric disease, diet-related diseases, ethnic customs, foreign visitors, ethnic taboos, and alternative therapies. Part II discusses intercultural marital conflicts, disease patterns of